CHARLIE'S GIRLS

We all leave home looking for something

that isn’t there. Family, you could call it. Togetherness. Or maybe just plain Love. Whatever it is, it’s not waiting for us inside those little lighted boxes on their little green hillsides with their little flags waving in front. It’s not at our kitchen tables or on the laps of our daddies. And you better believe it’s not on our TV screens.

Some of us come from afar, nasal New England toy towns and Rust Belt backwoods. Most of us come from closer. Santa Marina. San Gabriel. Redondo. You’ve probably seen us walking in the sunshine, tanned all year round, with our books pressed to our chests. We’re dreamy and don’t like chemistry or violin lessons. When we talk, it’s in dull, sultry tones; the heat that cracks the asphalt.

Some of us are cheerleaders, choir girls, homecoming queens. Some of us are wallflowers, just learning to let our hair down. We are all, without exception, beautiful – inside and out. Christ made us that way, but not the Christ you believe in.

Our daddies are veterans. They have cruel, boring jobs like “headmaster” and “stockbroker” and “aeronautical engineer”. Our mothers are dead or homemakers. They care about Glo-coat and cry every day of the week. There’s no Love there.

It’s in Haight-ashbury for a while, for those of us who get there early enough. After that, we have to look for it in wilder places, in the canyons and campervans beside the road. But none of us find it for real until Charlie.

Because if Love has a human form, it’s him. A man of 33 with a cleft in his chin and all the

darkness of locked prison cells in his eyes. He talks quietly, but everyone listens. He isn’t tall and strong like some GI Joe, but he doesn’t need to be. When he looks at us, it’s pure awareness, light coming to the surface and mingling with the dark, of which it is born and the same. And he knows us, body and soul. It’s all Love. Life or death, birthing or killing, it doesn’t matter. We killed them because we love them and now we’re standing in the living room, tripping over how good it looks. Rope hanging from the rafters. Bloody writing on the walls. Stuff scattered everywhere. Candleholders, ashtrays, matchbooks, potted plants. On the sofa, a big fat American flag.

People think death is ugly, but if you look at it with pure awareness, it’s the most beautiful thing in the world. Like all the sound and all the colour and all the beauty all at once. But the colours are fading on us and time is creeping back, oozy and slow to start with, then itching. We always listen to the animals inside our bodies, the writhing snakes and jumping rabbits and crawling insects. And they’re all telling us one thing – vámonos.

Out of that lit-up glasshouse, we run barefoot and night blooms around us, fragrant with hedges and bodies and blowing pine trees. The car is waiting at the bottom of the hill and Darling is clutching the wheel. Tex tells her to get over and she does and we all pile in, shivering in our wet creepy-crawlies. It’s wild how the blood chilled on us when it was so warm and groovy before. Kinda like cum, dribbling hot one second and Jell-o cold the next.

We get naked as Tex winds the car around and around, past leafy clumps and freaky-tall palm trees and splashes of papery red flowers. There’s angry streaks all over our skin, running down our thighs and bellies. Sadie touches her red fingers to her cunt and says, “Aunt Flo is in town!” which gets us all giggling. Then we get talking about what went down at the house.

“That bitch pulled my hair,” says Katie, who’s got the most magical brown hair, lush and long to her waist. “I got a killer headache.”

Sadie tries to one-up her by telling how the big dude beaned her, but Katie won’t be beat. “Man, my bones hurt. I kept stabbin’ and hittin’ bones and now my bones hurt.” That makes Tex laugh his big, hawing donkey laugh.

“Y’all heard their bones crack when I kicked ’em? Kkkk-chhhh!” Darling is the only one of us without a story to tell, since she was on lookout the whole time. Tex wants her to get her hands dirty too, so he tells her to hop out at this big ravine. Then he peels off his creepy-crawlies and passes them through the window, motioning us to do the same. Darling looks freaked over how wet the clothes are, and even more when Tex hands her the gun and knives. “No-one’s goin’ to see these for a million years. Get it?”

We all watch Darling walk in the moonlight to the edge of the ravine. The back seat’s leather feels cool against our backs, sexy. She throws everything down, drippy with blood, then squints into the darkness. Back in the car, she shows us her red hands.

The next afternoon, in the back ranch, we’re all glued to the TV set like little kids watching Looney Tunes. They keep showing pictures of the people from the house, especially the blonde, who was an actress and about to drop a baby. “...She was all like, ‘My baby, my baby!’ and I said, ‘Look bitch, I don’t care about you or your baby. You’re gonna die, so you better be ready.’” Sadie takes a toke and passes it along. The TV picture changes from the actress to the brunette, some kinda coffee heiress. “That’s the bitch that pulled my hair!” says Katie. We all boo and hiss, since Katie’s hair is magical; Charlie says we’re all gonna use it as a blanket someday when we go into the desert.

A little while later, Charlie wanders in and we all go quiet. Or maybe it’s a long while later and we’re already quiet, sprawling on the trailer floor. Either way, there’s Charlie’s voice and we all hear it, faraway like we’re underwater, but knife-clear. He says, “You done good.” We see his beautiful feet, his legs in tight buckskin. “Same deal tonight, but one more chick. Who’s it gonna be?”

“We killed them because we love them and now we’re standing in the living room, tripping over how good it looks”

“Charlie takes us to look at the mural we painted. It shows the end of time... the desert and valleys and Helter Skelter. ‘It’s now,’ he tells us”

That’s enough to get all of us sitting up, waving our hands and chiming, “Pick me, pick me, Charlie!” But out of everyone, he decides on Lulu. She’s Bobby’s girl and has only fucked Charlie two or three times, so we’re not sure why he chooses her. “Are you crazy enough to believe in me?” he asks Lulu, fixing her with his gun barrel stare. She stares back at him with her long-lashed beauty queen eyes. When she gets his signal, she yips like a coyote. It’s late and most of us are sitting around the bonfire when the group takes off. We don’t really notice them going, except in a far-off way, but we see them getting back at daybreak, waving at some dude in a Chevy they hitched with. They look fresh and happy in their change of clothes, telling stories about how easy it was. Lulu says they even hung around for a couple of hours after, taking showers and chugging chocolate milk from the fridge. “We played with their dogs, too,” she says. “Little fluffy white balls!”

A couple of days later, the ranch gets raided. Most of us are sleeping when the pigs storm in, kicking down doors and pointing M-15s. They drag us up by our hair and haul us out to the driveway, making us kneel in the dust with the guns aimed at our heads. Charlie always says the bigger the gun, the smaller the dick, and you can tell that’s how it is with these dudes. They’ve got bellies and buzz cuts and dinky helmets, and the word “Sheriff” sewn onto the backs of their uniforms. There’s even a couple of ’copters flying overhead, like it’s fucking Nam or something.

“Where’s your guru now?” the pigs smirk. “Looks like Jesus is savin’ his own skin.” We cuss them out, telling them Charlie doesn’t have to show his face if he doesn’t want to, that he can take any form he wants – a bird in the sky, wind through the trees, even a bit of dust on their nasty black boots. But eventually, a couple of them come out from around the barn with Charlie in cuffs. “Found this chickenshit hiding under the porch.”

Charlie gives us a sign with his eyes and we all go off, howling and yipping and calling out, “Right on, Charlie!” It’s a long time before they can shut us up and read out what we’re charged with: grand theft auto. We start yipping again as soon as we hear that. “Crazy bitches,” is all those pigs can say. We’re out of the slam within two weeks on insufficient evidence. The ranch looks like it’s been hit by a tornado, windows smashed in and cars confiscated and tumbleweed blowing across the drive. Darling and a couple of the newer chicks have split, probably back to their folks to get fat and become good little secretaries. Charlie takes us into the old saloon to look at the mural we painted a few months back. It shows the end of time, all in Dayglo colours; the desert and valleys and Helter Skelter coming from the sky. “It’s now,” Charlie tells us. “It’s comin’ down fast.” Death Valley is full of life if you know where to look. We find the skulls of bighorn sheep buried in the sand, antlers turned to rust. Chuckwallas scrambling into sagebrush. All kinds of groovy, night-blooming plants – spiked white cereus, sacred datura, moonlight cactus. Black skies swirling with stars and big, dusty moons. All night, coyotes howl from the outcrops.

Then there are the spiders, the scorpions, the rattlers. We lie down on the burning rocks and commune with them, watch their beautiful spines in motion and stare into their shiny black eyes. There’s no fear there, just wisdom; the kind that comes from millions of years of killing. They stare back without blinking. Slowly, they run their coils over our skin. “See the snake?” Charlie’s face flickers in the campfire. “See him on his belly? That’s the Devil, man. That’s JC. He’s tuned in. He lives 100 years a second, dig?”

Here in the desert, with our knives strapped to our ankles, it doesn’t take much to turn animal. If Charlie says snake, we become the snake. If he says coyote, we become the coyote. If he says stab, it’s moonlight and bleeding silver, baby. We dance in circles around the fire, slashing at whatever gets in our way. One time, Charlie gives us a sign to slash him, so we do, tearing at his body till all that’s left is a warm, loving ooze. Then we turn around and see him standing

naked under the moon, fully resurrected, wearing a crown of creosote. Man, it’s a trip.

Jesus is always fucking with people’s heads. They never taught us that in Sunday school, but it’s the truth. Water into wine. Death into life. Nothing into everything. That’s Love. That’s Christ. That’s Charlie.

The dudes drive into camp with stolen cars, strip them down and use the parts to build dune buggies. Someday, we’re gonna have hundreds of dune buggies, hidden all over the desert. We’re gonna mount machine guns on top of them so the guys can shoot while we drive, then we’re gonna swoop down on all the little towns and kill anyone who isn’t beautiful.

But the pigs have eyes on us, even out here. One night, coming back from the hot springs, we almost drive right into this trap they set for us – a big fat hole in the middle of the trail. Next to it is a big fat pile of dirt and a bigger, fatter yellow digging truck.

“Who-zam!” Charlie points and hollers when he sees it. Then we all hop out of the dune buggy.

As Charlie deals with the truck, we start filling the hole. “You come into my desert with your beast machines, you set your rabbit traps, you light your fires...” He lets out the fuel, pours some gas. Before he’s even done it, we see the flames jumping out of his fingertips.

The pigs don’t quit there. They fly their planes low over the desert, trying to flush us out, but we’re snaky. We keep low with our knives, staying under rocks and tarpaulins. One meal a day is enough for us. One little cup of water. One word in our heads: Love.

After dark, we go to work fortifying our camp, digging hideouts and rigging up barbed-wire traps. Charlie has this far-out idea of building a wall of human skulls and tells us how to boil the flesh from the bones. When we ask whose skulls we should use, he says, “Pigs, Judases, bitches. Heck, use Kitty here. She got a pretty head.”

Kitty is Charlie’s favourite punching bag lately, since she’s always playing the weak link, trying to get special treatment for being knocked up. We end up wishing we did take her head a few nights later, when we find she’s skedaddled with this other pregnant chick, Steph. We run out with our knives drawn, ready to christen the dark, but the trail goes cold. Turns out those sneaky pigs got to them first.

Everyone wants us to be afraid of death. If we’re not afraid, that means we don’t feel guilty, and if we’re not guilty, that means death isn’t the ugly thing they think it is. They want to keep death in the dark so bad, they can’t see that it’s everywhere beauty is – laughing in the street, throwing flowers, making love in long grass, dancing to beautiful music that comes in waves of red and green and purple.

Charlie says Jesus died with a hard-on and a sweet, sexy smile on his face. He knows because he lived it 2,000 years ago. He’ll live it again, if he has to. Already, he’s X-ed himself out of this world. We all have. That’s what the X we burned onto our foreheads stands for: we’re done, we’re giving up the system.

That bitch Darling turned state’s evidence. We all send black vibes her way while she’s sitting on the witness stand, talking about how horrible it was to hear those people screaming. It’s wacked how she can sit there, looking prissy and crying her eyes out, when she’s been touched by Charlie. It’s all gonna come back to get her, just you wait. Karma has special punishments in store for Judases like that.

Sitting around in court every day is a drag, especially when they’re always sending Charlie out for speaking truth. Our attorneys bring us drawing pads and coloured pencils, so we can pass some of the time doodling skulls and kittens and whatever. It kinda feels like being back in kindergarten, but it sure beats listening to those old dudes running their mouths all day.

Even though the trial’s been going on a few months, the TV people keep hanging around outside the courtroom, waiting to get a shot of the three of us in our hand-sewn outfits, made special by the girls outside – velveteen pants suits for Katie, see-through blouses for Sadie, flouncy dresses for Lulu. We’re Charlie’s girls. Our hands are linked and our hair flows long and lush. We smile big for the cameras and raise our voices in song.

Always is always forever Is one is one is one Inside yourself for your father All is one all is one all is none

We sing for all those girls outside, who we love. For our daddies hiding behind their newspapers, our mummies crying over burnt meatloaf. For all the square-eyed people watching us on television. Until the whole world knows we’re not afraid, we’ll keep singing.